I know only wisps of my grandmother’s life, those parts that came to me in stories told by my mother, or from the occasional times our family made the 3,000 mile trip from Southern California to the Virginia farm where she spent 64 years, her entire adult life.

I know she was a gentle woman with a sweet smile who spoke quietly and was of few words. She was not effusive with her emotions, but through her actions made it clear to her family that they were loved and to her guests that they were welcome.

To her, a bountiful table and a clean home were signs of love, not duty, and in these acts she never faltered. Big country breakfasts and Sunday chicken dinners could be counted on. So could Saturday chores and Sunday church, all of which gave her family a sense of order and stability that allowed them to flourish within those boundaries. She was the hub of the family with her quiet strength, and all were devoted to her.

Florence Elizabeth Collier was born on a cold winter day in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, just up the ridge from Jollett Hollow, on the edge of the Shenandoah Valley. She was the daughter of Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows Collier and William Durrett Collier, both of whom were also children of those mountains. It is likely that their home was hewn of rough wood, the gaps filled with clay mud and stones, and with packed dirt floors, as were many mountain homes in the early 1900s. The family had a large fruit orchard, fields they farmed, and nearly 500 acres of woodland from which they harvested chestnut tanbark in the spring.

Her mother was known as a healer, and used potions of mountain herbs to treat the patients who came to her for care. I’ve been told by people who knew Mary that mothers brought their babies to her when they suffered with thrush, believing that her breath, blown into the baby’s mouth, could heal the child. This was a gift believed to be bestowed on those who never met their fathers, as Mary was.

Florence did not attend school past the first few years, telling her mother that learning to read and write scared her, and she did not want that power. She preferred to stay at home, working in the fields and garden instead, helping her mother, preparing for the life of a farm wife. The work was hard, but she was undaunted. As a teen, full of life and promise, she “hoed all day and danced all night,” to use the phrase she told my mother years later.

It was no doubt at one of the area’s frequent barn dances that she met her future husband, Thomas Austin Merica. She was 17 when they married, and so small around that her young husband, tall and strong, could put his hands around her waist, making her blush with secret delight. That delight never left, and even years later her cheeks flushed when her husband spoke affectionately to her, especially when he called her Sally, a pet name.

One evening when my mother, then a teen, was getting ready for a date, she heard her father say to her mother, “They go somewhere and park.” Florence answered, “We were young once.” On another occasion Tom told his beautiful teenage daughters, Ruth and Annie, that neither one was as pretty as their mother. Far from being hurt, the girls were delighted at his love and loyalty.

A photo of my grandmother as a young woman of 22 shows that she was indeed a beauty. Her features are delicate and well-proportioned, and though there is no trace of a smile in the photo, there is tenderness in her full lips, and in the ever-so-slight tilt of her head. A great pile of brown hair is twirled loosely atop her head, wisps falling about her neck and ears. The story goes that her thick chestnut hair fell below her waist until a bout with pneumonia thinned it.

Her high-necked blouse, pleated at the breast and cinched tightly at the waist, is that of a plain and modest woman, as I know she was. The blouse appears to be of the same pattern as the one she wore in her wedding photo, and she no doubt made them both. In this picture a ribbon is wound several times around her neck and clasped with a round cameo broach, perhaps the same one as in her wedding photo. I wonder what ever became of that broach.

She was close to her sisters and her mother, and visited them regularly. Sometimes on a Sunday she asked her son Jesse to drive her and the younger children to visit her mother at her home on Naked Creek in Jollett Hollow, where Durrett and Mary moved after the government bought their former farm to make way for Shenandoah National Park.

Jesse hooked up the big horse, Pet, to the wagon, and off they’d go on the seven mile journey, stopping at the Meadows store on the way to buy mackerel, which Mary would cook up into fried cakes for lunch. Sometimes Mary’s other daughters came visiting too, and the mother and sisters, Florence, Annie, Emma, and Minnie, would talk the afternoon away while the children played by the creek.

Once the family got a car, a sturdy Model T Ford, Jesse would also drive his mother and sisters to visit Emma, who lived in Newport News, 175 miles away. Tom seldom made the journey.

The introduction of the automobile was an exciting event for Florence. Unlike some local people she was not afraid of riding in cars. My mother tells the story that Uncle Hunter, Tom’s brother, drove Florence and some other women up Grindstone Mountain to pick berries. On the way down the car began to go faster, frightening the other women to where they jumped out. Florence came home and laughed about the event with her family.

Maybe it’s not love that I feel so much as longing for my grandmother. Longing to know this woman whose blood runs in my veins, this woman who gave birth to my mother, who in turn gave life to me. When I was younger I was too busy to think about her. She was many miles and another world away. Now, 45 years after I watched my grandmother breath her last breath in her own home on a snowy winter night, her family around her, have I come to sense what a loss it was not to know her better.

She died in the same Virginia farmhouse where she spent her entire adult life; the farmhouse where she lost twins shortly after birth, but raised eight children to adulthood. Where she grew roses along the white picket fence and lilacs outside the parlor window, a big kitchen garden and orchards in the back. Where she cooked on a wood stove and did her business in an outhouse until her death in 1969, never having seen the point of modern technologies.

Where she fried dried apple turnovers for her children, baked coconut cake for Christmas, sewed quilts to keep her family warm, cooked enormous meals for the men who came to help at harvest time, listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the parlor radio, and lived a just and satisfying life, relatively free of drama or pain.

I wish I could say more about my grandmother, but these are the only memories, and the only bits of knowledge passed to me by my mother, that I have. They will have to do.

Here and there they come across an old mossy wall, the rough foundation of a home long gone, or a graveyard barely visible through the bramble.

Each of those are testament to a time forever lost, a time when the mountains rang with voices of a different kind, the voices of people whose homes and barns and cemeteries these were. People who tended gardens, pastured their cattle, built schools and churches, and lived full lives in these mountains, most for generations.

In the mid-1700s they started to come, traveling south on the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to Shenandoah. Settlers were quick to take up the fertile bottom land of the Valley. Latecomers of necessity moved further and further up the mountain, laying claim to every bit of clearable land and making do with what they could find.

For 200 years those generations eked out their living from the rough soil and rugged mountains.

Now they are all gone, the forest abandoned to its wild ways and the few intrepid hikers who venture from their cars into those deep woods.

In 1934 they began to leave, some of their own accord, others not, when government used the power of eminent domain to clear land for Shenandoah National Park.

Some walked down the mountain without a glance back, never to return. Others were dragged away, literally thrown from their homes, their doors barred by police against any thought of coming home.

It was a nasty business, and one the bureaucrats were loath to take on. But they had jobs to perform, objectives to achieve, and the mountain people were unfortunately in their way. That was the cold truth.

At one time tens of thousands lived in those mountains. But when the thin topsoil was spent, the trees harvested and hills nearly bare, many left.

By 1934 only about 7,000 remained in 250 square miles. But seven thousand is a lot of people to relocate, especially considering nearly all had
to be coaxed or moved reluctantly from their homes, some kicking and screaming.

This is the dark past of Shenandoah National Park.

A few who were evicted are still alive, although they were mere children then, their memories foggy now, unreliable in the details of their stories, but clear enough to tell of heartless government agents, and of negative depictions that painted them as slovenly, mentally deficient, sub-normal.

There are others who were not yet alive back then and heard the stories from their parents and grandparents. Some of these descendants are encyclopedic in their knowledge of the evictions. Others have distilled their families’ stories down to pure resentment, discarding details and facts, leaving only anger. The bitterness is carried down from father to son, mother to daughter, and in many, it is still palpable today.

The stories resonate. There was Lissie Jenkins, five months pregnant, who sat her rocking chair and would not move, and so was dragged out, rocking chair and all. I’ve imagined her fear of the unknown after most of a lifetime on that mountain; how losing the security of that place may have been more than she could emotionally bear. We are not all adventurers. We do not all look at an unknown future with the optimism of opportunity, but instead, cling to our chosen rocking chair as if it alone holds us to this earth.

I’ve thought of John Mace, who watched the police stack his furniture in front of his house and set it all afire, his soul no doubt smoldering as the flames engulfed all the physical evidence of his life.

What could he have felt but seething fury at such an act? And what could his neighbors feel but fear and distrust, knowing they would be next if they did not cooperate? Of course with such acts the government became the enemy to many.

I’ve thought of John Nicholson, who was accused of theft after taking the windows from his father’s home, a home that was set to be torn down.

Of Lillie Herring, also accused of theft from her own home, who wrote with proud indignation to officials, “I am not lieing on no one and I’m not telling you one ward more that you can prave and I am living up to what I say.”

And of of Elmer Hensley, who made the simple request to take down his cabin, one log at a time, so he could rebuild it on land outside the Park boundaries. The simple request was denied, with no explanation given.

These acts stink of the meanness and arrogance of some agents, and form the mythology that surrounds the evictions, that they were indeed historic criminal acts by a tyrannical government.

Were they?

My great-grandparents as well as countless cousins, aunts, and uncles were among those summarily tossed out. William Durret Collier and his wife, Mary Meadows Collier, lived up the mountain from Jollett Hollow.

They owned nearly 500 acres of land, harvesting chestnut tanbark each spring and hauling it by horse-driven wagon down the mountains to the tannery in Elkton.

They kept fruit orchards, managed the farm of a wealthier neighbor, and raised six girls and a son.

When the men from Washington came around, they knew they had no option but to sell, and did not protest. They used the money to buy a home at the base of their mountain, outside the future park’s boundaries, close enough that they still walked up to their old orchards to pick apples years after that place was abandoned.

They were happy with what they got, and the stories my family passed down are that most others were happy with what they got too. But maybe that is just my family. After all, this is vastly different from the stories I’ve read about, of Lizzie Jenkins and John Mace and Elmer Hensley and the others who did not want to leave their mountain homes.

Then again, simple satisfaction is nothing we remember in detail, as we do outrage. The blood doesn’t boil, the adrenaline doesn’t rush with something so ordinary as satisfaction.

That is nothing we commit to stories, or create mythologies around.

Satisfaction does not bond people together as outrage does. It does not inspire rallying cries that cross generations.

Only outrage and its related emotions do that. And so that is what is remembered. It is why family feuds endure across generations. Why hostilities between two groups can last so long that no one is quite sure why they are hostile anymore, but only that they are.

My ancestors became lost to history, while Lizzie Jenkins and those others became standard bearers for the protesters of government oppression.

Yes, there were authentic tragedies and injustices associated with building the Park. Lives ruined not just when the government threw them from their homes, but decided they were so inferior that they needed to be taken from their families and institutionalized. Lives were wasted, and many literally wasted away in the cold corridors of institutions.

They were victims of the “Progressive Movement” that swept America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when do-gooders roamed not just the Blue Ridge and Appalachia, but all through the cities and countryside looking for pockets of poverty to eradicate.

They believed that people of the lowest classes should be either “fixed,” or marginalized, and so set about sorting people into the “deserving” and “undeserving” classes. “Social progress is a higher law than equality,” wrote one reformer.

In Virginia alone, more than 7,000 people were forcibly sterilized. About half of those were deemed mentally ill, the other half mentally “deficient.”

Some women were put away, sterilized, or both because of “loose morals.” Children were taken from their parents because they were “feeble-minded.”

Many of my fellow Blue Ridge descendants have ancestors who were thus locked up for the sin of poverty.

It was a dark time in America. The “fixers” thought they were “doing good.” They were very, very wrong.

We as a nation recognize that people were wronged. We have institutionalized this memory in textbooks and schools. I remember studying the movement and its repercussions in college, and the teaching emphasized the injustice that was done. By remembering, we can hope it will never happen again.

But what we remember must resemble the truth of what really happened, not the hopped-up inaccuracies that continue to fan the flames of anger.

Some descendants are angry that their Blue Ridge ancestors were lied to, told they could stay on in their parkland homes forever.

Yes indeed, this was the plan at one time, to let people stay. There were many early plans that did not come to fruition, and numerous reasons why this one did not happen.

Early on the Park was planned to include nearly 400,000 acres. Because that much acreage would have encompassed too many economically vital farms, and because the Depression was causing contributions from donors to dry up, the planned acreage was drastically reduced to 163,721 acres.

Reduction of the acreage required a new bill from Congress, and a rider was attached promising that current homeowners would be allowed to stay so long as they did not hamper the park.

However, Arno B. Cammerer, a lifelong bureaucrat and future Director of the National Park Service, wrote a report stating, “This particular class of mountain people is as low in the social order and as destitute as it seems possible for humans to get…. It is not known how many squatters of similar degree of intelligence, of lack of intelligence, are within the park area proper, but, every one of them being a potential beggar, it is not considered a practical proposition to authorize their retention on lifetime leases within the park.”

Those are harsh words, and hard to read without feeling anger at their writer for such judgment. He deserves condemnation for making such a report without knowing the people about whom he is writing.

Though a few no doubt would turn to begging, Mr. Commerer accused and convicted the entire mountain populace. It is because of this man’s report and influence that the act of Congress granting lifetime tenancy was discarded, the people forcibly removed. But was the original plan to keep residents in their homes a lie? No. An abhorrent act and reneging of a stated plan, yes. A lie, no.

Some descendants claim, too, that their ancestors were cheated, not given fair value for their homes. I have tried to prove that this is true.

I have searched every document I can find, spent many hours looking for evidence of underpayment. I wanted to find that they were cheated, so as to give justice to the people today who still feel so wronged.

But instead, I found just the opposite. Everything I have seen points to the mountain residents being compensated generously for the enormous disruption to their lives of having to leave their homes.

I found that comparable mountain land sold for an average of $5 per acre before the Park. Indeed, Herbert Hoover bought 164 acres right on the Rapidian River for $5 an acre even as Shenandoah National Park was being planned.

Looking through the National Park Service’s records of payments, it appears that the average compensation was well above that $5 appraised average. My own great grandfather, W. D. Collier, received $4,295 for his 452 acres plus three structures, one a two-story 18′ x 32′ house and another a 14′ x 22′ barn, plus another 13′ x 13′ building.

His per-acre compensation was $9.50 an acre for the forest land that he used to harvest tanbark in the spring. It was not the most valuable land, which would be tableland, but it was productive, income-generating land. He would feel that loss of income and have to seek his livelihood elsewhere.

The median home value in America in 1934 was $2,278, and no doubt far less in the Blue Ridge. But using that figure, Durret Collier would have been able to replace his home and buy approximately 400 acres, about what he lost. Indeed, my great-grandparents bought a house and land, and felt they made out well in the deal.

Did others make out financially as well? Looking at the evidence, I have to say it seems most did.

Fannie Lamb received $3,400 for her 5.9 acres, which must have been prime land. Lloyd Spitler received $200 for his two acres.

John Eppard received $2,074 for his 172 acres. Old Rag United Brethren Church got $1,000 for their quarter acre plus church. The Old Rag school got $800 for their half acre plus schoolhouse.

On the other hand, Allegheny Ore & Iron got only $1.98 an acre for their 1,434 acres, and Bessie Keyser received only $334 for her 102 acres. Most others fell in between those extremes.

It’s easy to see why some might feel their ancestors were cheated when looking at those prices. But it’s helpful to remember that $1,000 in 1934 was the equivalent of $17,763.51 today because of inflation. That is almost a 1,700 percent rise in prices since then, an incredible amount of inflation. I hope this puts some perspective on the prices our ancestors received for their property.

Of course, there is no denying that most mountain people would have far preferred to stay in their homes rather than move off the mountains. Eminent domain is a nasty business, when the state decides that its interests are more important than those of the individual.

Many people believe there is no justification for eminent domain under any circumstances. These are mostly Jeffersonian Republicans who believe the greatest threat to liberty is posed by a tyrannical central government.

That party, the Jeffersonian Republican party, is dead today, but its traditions live on, mostly in the South. For those with that view, the Shenandoah National Park will always seem an illegitimate place, born of the gross injustice served on our ancestors.

For them, only this point is relevant. Many of those ancestors were versed in the Constitution and believed the Park to be unconstitutional. They described it as “federally occupied territory.”

I am more moderate. I believe that there are occasions when “the greater good” is served by self-sacrifice. And as one who also believes that the most majestic, beautiful, and sacred places in America should be preserved for all generations, I believe that creation of the Shenandoah National Park was an injustice to a few for the greater good of the many.

That my ancestors were made to sacrifice, I am sorry. I can only hope they also saw the greater good of the Park’s creation, and felt justly compensated. In fact, from family stories passed down, I know this to be true. But for the descendants who believe the individual reigns supreme over the state in every or nearly instance, eminent domain is one of the grossest injustices. No other circumstance matters.

This exercise in examining the evidence in development of the Shenandoah National Park was illuminating. I am satisfied in what I found regarding the one big missing piece of information I sought: that mountain residents were indeed compensated fairly.

But I also learned something about those who are still bitter over the park. Only now have I come to appreciate the power of some descendant’s political beliefs in their opinion over whether their ancestors were treated justly. Politics just had not occurred to me, but now it makes complete sense.

The bitterness is not because they think their ancestors did not get fair prices, as I thought. It is not even per se that their ancestors were made to move. It is, instead, that they believe the government has no right to forcibly take an American citizen’s land, no matter how much the compensation.

This is about liberty, and an individual’s rights over the rights and privileges of the government. It was for the ideal of individual rights and liberty that America was founded, and they believe no government has the right to infringe on those rights. Eminent domain is one of the most egregious usurpations of rights.

It is true that the depiction of mountain residents was unnecessarily pejorative, and it was unfortunate that many were swept up in the national movement for social engineering.

It is a pity that the plan to allow residents to stay for their lifetimes was undermined by one man. These are all important elements of the mishandling of the Park’s development process.

Would it go more smoothly if done today? It’s hard to say. Government is messy. Two-party democracy is especially messy. (Winston Churchill once said, “democ­racy is the worst form of gov­ern­ment except for all those other forms that have been tried.”)

I cannot say that all of the mistreatment can be attributed to the ways of that time in history, though I believe that the slanderous accusations and social engineering experiments were of that time in history and would not be repeated today.

America has the greatest system of national parks in the world. Writer Wallace Stegner called them “America’s best idea.” I may not go that far, but I am proud of them and thankful for them.

As our country gets more and more crowded, there will be a time in the not so distant future when these will be our only places of pristine wilderness, which we all need for the health of our bodies and souls. For me, that is the greater good that made Shenandoah National Park necessary to create.

One only has to visit those peaks and woods during October to see why they were worth preserving. To walk among the tall trees and thick underbrush, through sun-warmed meadows and along cascading streams, stirring up that musty forest floor scent with every step, moving through rays of autumn light that slant through the bent and crooked branches.

This is a quiet beauty. Even the flaming autumn colors blend to a muted tapestry that folds over those soft-rolling and time-worn mountains. I hear echos of my ancestors deep in those woods, their voices riding on the wind like phantoms of the past.

Four generations of my families lived and died there, names like Markey, Meadows, McDaniel, Collier, Tanner, and Breeden still today rising up from hallowed Blue Ridge ground on grave markers that remained behind when the living left.

Today the Blue Ridge belongs to all of us. And for that I am grateful.

The following is a review of Sue Eisenfeld’s new book about the hearty mountaineers who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains before creation of Shenandoah National Park, and who were evicted and moved from their homes to make way for the Park. Eisenfeld is a resident of Arlington, VA, and a frequent visitor to the Park. Her book is available for order and immediate shipping now, but will not be released to book stores until February 1, 2015.

Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal

Sue Eisenfeld
University of Nebraska, $19.95

The forces of history sometimes meet with such violence that they are not easily forgotten. It can happen in monumental ways, such as the clash of North and South in the Civil War. Or in entirely small ways, as when the country’s attempt to create a national park in the Eastern United States, led in part by Northerners, met with a group of irascible residents of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

In the mid-1920s the Federal government wanted a national park within easy distance of the crowded urban centers in the East and determined that the Blue Ridge was the ideal location. The fact that it was inhabited land seemed no more than an afterthought to be dealt with at a later time with tactics not yet determined. There was no precedent; no national park had been cobbled together with private properties before. The thirteen previously designated parks were created from lands already held by the government.

What ensued was a nearly decade long battle involving state and federal courts and legislatures, private boosters, public bureaucrats, three presidents, two governors, and 465 Blue Ridge families. In the end, we know, Shenandoah National Park was built, a grand expanse of some of the loveliest mountains and forests in the world, visited and beloved by millions, and an economic mainstay for Virginia during the Great Depression and afterward. What few people know, though, is that those mountains and forests conceal the forgotten vestiges of private lives that once flourished there before the evictions of eminent domain forced them out.

Of course, if you’ve been inside the Park’s visitor center at Big Meadows and paid attention at the exhibits, you know something about the former residents. The gift shop, too, carries a range of books that tell stories of the displaced families. Add to those Sue Eisenfeld’s new book, “Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal.” Eisenfeld is neither conservationist nor anthropologist, (although she was formerly an environmental consultant) but instead an experienced Park hiker whose book nurses a long-held fascination for the bits and shards of human history that rest hidden there. Though this is her first book, Eisenfeld is an accomplished writer with bylines in publications ranging from The New York Times to Virginia Living.

“Shenandoah” is Eisenfeld’s simple love song to the Park, the place she clearly loves to be, and to those feisty mountaineers who did not go gently when told they would have to leave for the sake of returning their mountains to a pristine, uninhabited state. In the book’s prologue she says her aim was to “quell [her] growing discomfort of enjoying this misbegotten but beloved park.” She wanted “to know the people who once lived here and the men who determined their fate, and to discern for [herself] the justice of what happened here.”

What happened there has been well documented, particularly by Darwin Lambert in his 1989 book, “The Undying Past of Shenandoah National Park,” and Audrey J. Horning’s archeological study, the results as published in the journal Archeology in 2000 and in her 2004 book, “In the Shadow of Ragged Mountain.” Indeed, the cultural anthropology of Virginia’s Blue Ridge has been well studied ever since publication of “Hollow Folk,” a 1933 somewhat shocking sociological study describing Blue Ridge dwellers as “unlettered folk, sheltered in tiny mud-plastered log cabins and supported by a primitive agriculture,” living in a place “almost entirely cut off from the current of American life.” Even before that study, social worker Miriam Sizer wrote that the mountain people were “steeped in ignorance, wrapped in self-satisfaction and complacency, possessed of little or no ambition,” stating further that having “little comprehension of law, or respect for law, these people present a problem…”

Those views bolstered public opinion and bureaucratic action when it came time to oust residents from their lands to create the park. Organizers spun a story that rather than being evicted from their homes, the mountain folk were being saved, moved from their primitive mountain homes to more civilized regions of agriculture and industry. The eviction plan coincided with relief efforts undertaken by the federal government to assist farmers across the nation in actions deemed necessary after the duel disasters of historic drought and the Great Depression struck farmers hard. Many of the Blue Ridge orchards and crops had died, leaving farm families destitute and in some cases starving. According to a 1934 survey, approximately thirty percent already received welfare aid. Even so, the “hollow folk” were loath to leave, whether because these were their ancestral homes dating to the mid-1700s, they preferred their hardscrabble but independent mountain way of living, or they just did not possess the imagination to picture life elsewhere. For sure, by 1930 the sons and daughters of the Blue Ridge were already moving from the mountains, leaving a preponderance of elderly residents who would likely anywhere be adverse to moving.

Of course, a complete inquiry into the “justice of what happened here” necessarily must address the constitutionality of eminent domain, which Eisenfeld does. In 1929 Washington stipulated that no federal funds be used to acquire land for the park, and so that task fell to the Commonwealth of Virginia. It was first proposed that the state outright purchase lands from their owners, but that route was deemed too difficult, as any one landowner could hold up the entire project by refusing to sell. The state decided instead to pass a Public Park Condemnation Act that allowed the purchase of land at fair market value by right of eminent domain in a blanket condemnation of the 3,000 privately owned parcels. A number of lawsuits were filed, with one making its way first to the Supreme Court of Virginia, and finally up the ladder to the US Supreme Court, which upheld the state’s right of eminent domain.

Descendants of the park evictees still express their continuing anger today, much of it directed at what they believe was the unconstitutionality of the evictions, as well as the negative stereotypes used to portray their ancestors. For them, the Supreme Court was not the final arbiter; history will be. Organized groups such as Children of Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Heritage have actively sought to revise the unflattering historical accounts of their ancestors and shine a light on the heroic but in the end futile battles fought to save their land.

Eisenfeld could have used these numerous sources to discern the justice of what happened in the Blue Ridge, but she chose a more intrepid way, diving deep into the Park to find her own evidence. It is unclear what concrete or tangible evidence she was looking for, but what she found amounted to little more than a rusted washbasin here, a stone wall or barn foundation there, and a handful of former residents’ stories, only a few of which were first-person sources. But while her ambulatory searches produced scant payoff, her inner search progresses unspoken with each page of her book. Her transformation from mountaineer apologist to her more nuanced understanding of both builders and mountaineers unfolds so subtly that it is hard to discern until the final pages of her book.

The reader is invited to join Eisenfeld on her trip to that understanding. This is her story of discovery, of how she came to know and love the people of the future park and their descendants, as well as the cemeteries, cabins, and crumbling homesteads they left behind. Spending years hiking there before realizing there was a cultural side to the Park, once discovered, she decided that, “The story, as it seemed to me, was that a bunch of urban, privileged men in suits simply swooped in and muscled a few thousand self-sufficient farmers, orchardists, lumbermen, millers, and mountain tradesmen off the land against their will.” This is the attitude that starts her book and makes it understandable that she must take that journey. For if the Park’s creation was so cut and dry an act of human destruction, how could she love the Park as she so clearly seems to? This is the moral journey of “Shenandoah.”

Where the author excels is when recounting her treks through the towering poplars and wretched brambles of the Park. Her prose is spare and unsentimental, yet evocative of the hardscrabble lives whose ghosts lie beneath the decomposing leaves of the forest floor. Eisenfeld kicks them up as she goes, raising a forgotten cemetery here, a lone headstone there. “Nothing,” she writes, “takes down a burial ground faster than nature’s demolition services.” She describes a forgotten dry-stack stone wall as “moss and lichen covered, like liver spots on an aged hand” within this “de-peopled and re-wilded park.” At times you hear the crackle of dry leaves underfoot or feel the cold creeping into your fingers as you read about her park hikes, taken mostly in fall and early spring.

In 1930 the author Wallace Nutting, in his book Virginia Beautiful, observed that “sometimes we hesitate to provide far enough in the future. Now [Shenandoah National Park] may seem a vast area to segregate and pay for. But fifty years from now the grandchildren will bless us for every square mile thus forever secured.” We’re eighty five years on now, and not all the grandchildren are yet blessing those park founders, but Sue Eisenfeld is, it seems, satisfied. Indeed, the last sentence of “Shenandoah” proclaims that “…it almost seems that the long, hard eternal price for it all was worth it.”

“Almost” implies that her journey to understanding is not yet complete, which means that we can hope for further books from Sue Eisenfeld.

We are nearly all the descendants of immigrants, those hearty people who risked everything to start again in a new land. Their bravery and fortitude made our country what it is today, made each of us what we are today.

To emigrate in the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Century was to leap by faith alone into the unknown, leaving behind home and family, familiar neighborhoods, routines well established, even loved ones they never wished to leave behind. All to begin again from scratch with little more than a few precious dollars and enormous stores of energy and faith.

Most of us fortunate enough to have been born in America will never know the immigrant experience. We’ll never know those forces of poverty, oppression, or persecution so strong that they drive emigrants to leave their homes and venture into the unknown. We’ll never know their particular kind of hope and fear mixed with regret and relief, the concoction of emotions that has driven immigrants to our land for nearly four hundred years, and continues to drive them today.

Hope, fear, regret, and relief. What recipe is this? It is when we leave anything once loved behind in order to better our lives. A lover, a spouse, a job, a home, a town, a country. We hope for better lives, but fear the unknown. We regret that our lives didn’t work out as planned, but feel relief at being free of untenable circumstances. We feel nothing as simple as a single emotion, but a mixture so foreign that we can’t put our fingers on it. And so the emotions churn about and we describe it physically, as feeling numb, or having a reeling head or a pounding heart.

For our Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century ancestors who left their fertile Rhine River Valley homeland in Germany to seek better life in America, the need to leave was acute. Their country had been the finest in Europe, a land of noble heroes and spectacular scenery, of majestic castles and cathedrals and prosperous farms and orchards. But forces conspired to make life difficult for our ancestors there.

Traditional inheritance practices in Germany meant that land was divided equally between all children, which meant that farms were made increasingly smaller, and land hunger drove the people to search farther afield for suitable property. More important, Germany was torn by nearly ceaseless war, its once mighty empire in now in fragments, its people desperate and hungry.

The Holy Roman Empire of Germany during the Middle Ages was the wealthiest and most powerful in all Europe. Art and science flourished there. Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type, which made possible the Enlightenment and the spread of knowledge throughout the civilized world. Germany’s prosperous farmers and skilled craftsmen were hailed as the finest in all Europe.

Then in the early 1500s Martin Luther translated the Bible into German and gave his people not only direct access to the word of God, but the language of literature and poetry. Luther didn’t stop there, though. He went on to publicly question the very tenants of the Catholic Church, leading others to do the same and sparking one of the greatest revolutions of all time, the Protestant Reformation, and leading the way to the Age of Enlightenment.

But the road to Enlightenment was full of terror and violence. And thus was ushered in one of the most destructive and longest wars in European history. The Holy Roman Empire was fragmenting. War after war raged through the land. The Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, the War of the Grand Alliance, the War of the Spanish Succession.

One after another they crashed like tidal waves against the people, wreaking more destruction each time until carnage covered the land and the countryside and its people were in ruin. Religious hatred and political divisions pitted Catholic against Protestant, Hapsburg against Ottoman, north against south, prince against prince, and in their armies, peasant and farmer against peasant and farmer. The devastation was enormous, the taxes oppressive as local leaders sought more and more money to wage war.

The country’s population was ravaged, falling from thirty million to twelve million as the Holy Roman Empire fought for its very existence against the rise of Protestantism. As in any war, the common people suffered disproportionately. Some fled. Many died.

Unpaid armies and bands of mercenaries roamed the countryside pillaging and plundering, villages left burning and their people dead or without sustenance. And then the winter of 1708 came, the coldest in 100 years. Birds, it was said, froze in mid-air, men mid-step. Farms and their farmers perished in the cold, and the people cried, “Enough!” Those who could, left.

Many fled to Switzerland or the Alsace region of France. After the end of hostilities some went home, some stayed, but many came to America, mostly to Pennsylvania. A generation before, William Penn visited Germany to spread the word that Pennsylvania would welcome them.

Some were old enough to remember the handbills passed out by his agents throughout the country proclaiming a land of milk and honey; a place where the climate was temperate, the fertile soil nearly free, kings and princes unknown, and religious and political tolerance the cornerstones of society. A place where Germans could prosper and thrive, free at last. If only they could get there.

And so our ancestors pleaded their case to England’s Queen Anne, saying,

“We, the poor, distressed Palatines, whose utter ruin was occasioned by the merciless cruelty of a bloody enemy whose prevailing power, some years past, like a torrent, rushed into our country and overwhelmed us at once; and being not content with money and food necessary for their occasions, not only dispossessed us of all support, but inhumanly burnt our houses to the ground, whereby being deprived of all shelter, we were turned into open fields, there with our families to seek what shelter we could find, were obliged to make the earth our repository for rest and the clouds the canopy for covering.”

The sympathetic queen thus invited the beleaguered Protestant Germans to sail to America on English ships, offering them passage and land in exchange for bonded labor.

By the thousands, they packed their meager belongings and headed for the promised land. From May to November of 1709 nearly thirteen thousand passengers left their desolate homeland and sailed the Rhine to Rotterdam, and on to England. By June there were one thousand immigrants passing through Rotterdam every week.

Of those, there were 2,257 Catholics who were sent back. The enmity between the two was far from over. One historical account written in 1897 quotes a contemporary diarist who wrote, “Thursday, 29 September [1709]. The Popish Palatines who came hither, were ordered to go home, having passports for the same.”Queen Anne knew exactly who she wanted to populate her colonies. She was designing her ideal New World.

After arriving in England, from there our ancestors traveled on to Canada, Australia, Ireland, or America. Once in America the Protestant Germans who answered Queen Anne’s offer were required to pay off their price of passage by working in camps set up for that purpose along the Hudson River.

After that tour of duty, which typically lasted five to seven years, they were finally free. Free to practice their religion. Free to find and homestead land. Free to join in building a new country that was free to all.

Many of the immigrants made their way to William Penn’s land, which had been given to that quirky Quaker by England’s Charles II in repayment of a debt to Penn’s father, one of the largest land grants awarded an individual in all history. Penn wished to name the land Sylvania for its vast forests of trees, but the king wanted to name it in honor of Penn’s father. They compromised, and the land became known as Pennsylvania.

Lutherans, Reformed, Swiss Mennonites, Baptist Dunkers, Moravians, Quakers, and Amish all flooded into Pennsylvania’s wilder regions. A second wave of immigrants began in 1727, and from then to 1775, around 65,000 Germans landed in Philadelphia and settled in Pennsylvania.

These are our ancestors, the ones who survived war and religious persecution to find their way to America and once here, to build strong frontier families that made their way without the aid of anyone excepting their nearest neighbors, who were also a hearty stock of immigrants. They cut their homes from the forest and built their farms with blood and sweat. They survived and thrived and raised their families well, which led, in the end, to you and me.

So when you think on your German ancestors, think of the historical times in which they lived, the history-making events they endured and helped to shape, and the hope, fear, regret, and relief they felt to the depths of their being in coming to America. We can be proud of such character and strength that brought them here. And remember, those genes reside in us, too.

I’m on a work project with no time to write, so I am posting this oldie but goodie. Enjoy!

I have lots of photos of my father’s mother. Portraits of her as a child. Portraits of her as a young woman. Portraits of her with her twin babies. Then snapshots of her with family, with friends over the years. A full chronology of my grandmother’s life.

But I can count the photos of my grandfather on one hand and still have a finger left over. He wasn’t camera shy. He just didn’t stop for the camera. In the first photo he is a boy of ten. It’s 1890 and he is with his family before their very large Ohio farmhouse (I count nine windows and four doors on just the two sides I can see). It looks to be late winter and this yard is no doubt beautiful in summer with its overhang of leafy trees and long views, but here it is a mess of mud and melting snow, a hazard for the ruffled skirts and high heel boots of his sisters. Grandaddy is in knee-high leather boots and holding the harnesses of two yearling calves, an odd prop for a family photo, and amusing given the formality of the other family members. He looks like he was just passing through and the photo’s subjects stepped aside to make way for him, he stopping for a moment before moving on. He was always headstrong, so more likely he insisted on including two calves he was raising himself.The next photo is a good 20 years later. My grandparents lived in a big two-story Colonial on Glen Road in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. Granddaddy commuted across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan each day. In the photo his suit coat is off and tie is loosened. He is holding his baby boy in the air, gazing at him as if in sheer wonder. Or perhaps sheer fear, because these new twin boys were conceived bittersweetly three years after my grandparents’ darling daughters, one six and one six months, died of then-incurable disease, my grandmother deciding she would never again have children. Her own father had to intervene to persuade her that she could love other children, but that’s another story for another time. Granddaddy waited patiently, as was really his only choice, and now I have this photo of him cautiously holding this precious bundle of baby that was my father. Or uncle. I can’t tell.Sometime during their Woodcliff Lake period he decided to invent a better kind of running shoe. He had been a track star at Oberlin College and held the “Big Six” record for the fastest two mile. Only fragments of the running shoe story remain. The soles were made from tires, or tire rubber. To prove their superiority he ran in them from Woodcliff Lake to Passaic (20 miles) or Lima, Ohio (625 miles), I forget which. That’s all I know. There is no photo commemorating his accomplishment. In fact, I have no other photo of him until about 40 years later.

In that photo he is an elder in his 80s, standing next to his brother and behind my grandmother who finally, after a life more nomadic and in all ways unsettled than she ever wanted, was sitting in the lap of luxury at her Leucadia, California home, the gleaming Pacific to one side and an endless panorama of rolling hills to the other. Granddaddy lived in that lap of luxury too, but it was luxury he did not want and did not take to with ease. The febility of old age frustrated his need to put one foot in front of the other toward some fanciful goal.

As a boy Granddaddy was a prodigy. I have it on numerous family authorities that he flew through high school in one year and graduated from Oberlin College in two years. He was fluent in English, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin and Portuguese. As a recent graduate he accepted a one-year position to teach school in the Philippine Islands, where he became fluent in Tagalog. On coming back he went to work for a Wall Street Bank as an interpreter. A few years later he moved his family onto a commune called The School of Living in Suffern, New York, founded by the noted utopian, Ralph Borsodi. After a few years of that he scouted the Land of California, writing home that it was “a magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.” That impressed the family, and as soon as my dad was home from WWII, off they went.

They weren’t following history, though. California’s greatest population booms followed the Great Depression and World War II. In the 1930s thousands of Americans, left destitute by the double whammy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, went west in search of work. By that time my grandfather’s brother, Waldo Berryman was already moving his growing auto aftermarket company from Ohio to Palo Alto. He eventually moved it to Encinitas, California, though I don’t know if that was before or after my branch of the family moved there.

After WWII thousands more Americans moved to California after GIs had passed through there on their way to the Pacific Theater. They came home, grabbed their wives or sweethearts, and headed for the promised land of sunshine and opportunity. By the time my father was home from war the family’s bags were packed, furniture all shipped, and car gassed up and ready to head west and join Granddaddy in the Berryman family’s new-found home upon that “magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.”

In the last photo I have of my Grandaddy he is an old man walking, stooped and gnarled by Parkinson’s, but still, as he always was, moving forward and deep in thought.

I recently went hunting for photos of him online. Surely, with all he had done, there were photos of him in some college yearbook, newspaper, or historical archive. I know he was a track star in college, so I Googled “Robert Fulton Berryman” and “two mile,” his specialty.

Nothing.

I tried the search again with “R. F. Berryman” and bingo, I landed on the Oberlin College yearbook of 1905. (Thank you www.archive.org – you always come through!) I found the yearbook photo of the Oberlin track team. But…argh! The team members were not named in order of the photo. There was no, “Named, left to right.” In fact, there were more young men in the photo than names to the side. This wasn’t going to be easy. After studying each face, looking for my grandfather’s unmistakable upside-down pear shaped head, I settled on just one possibility. He had to be the confident looking young man sitting in the bottom row, second from right. Technically he’s seated in the second row, I suppose, but also technically his is the second head from bottom right.

I still don’t know for sure if this is Robert Fulton Berryman, Oberlin Class of 1905. But I’m going to believe it is. Because he was almost certainly in the track team photo and no one else is a close match. Because the head shape, ears, and eyes match the photo I have from 1960. And because the only photos I have of this man I loved so dearly are blurred, dark, or from his back or side.

I take this from these few scattered facts or semi-facts: Robert Fulton Berryman always ran towards, never from. The whole world was that magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude. He raced through college and then ran (not literally, I must point out) to the Philippines to see the aftermath of the Spanish American War. He got an inheritance and so ran to Oklahoma to start a sheep ranch (fine occupation for an academic prodigy!). He ran from Wall Street to a commune, and from there to California. Whether he got comfortable in California and so decided not to explore further lands I don’t know. I do know that as I age, changing my life gets harder. I would like to move someplace completely different than coastal Southern California, but so many ties tether me here. After a while in one place it gets like that. But that’s another story for another time.

Grandaddy didn’t have time for cameras. But he had time for me. No camera can capture that.

No time to write this weekend. Here’s an oldie but goody….Mine is not a family of storytellers. I don’t know what my father did in World War II. I don’t know if his heart skipped a beat the first time he saw his future wife, my mother. I don’t know if there was an instant he doubted he would live when his sailboat was torn to toothpicks in a hurricane a mile off the Florida coast. That was an event. But it’s not a story. I don’t know why he made it to shore across a mile of stormy seas, only that he did.

It might sound funny to wonder why he lived. But plenty of people wouldn’t have. Even people with the swimming skills and physical strength to make it. You also need a powerful will to live and the courage to face what look like insurmountable odds. He was sailing solo so there was no one else to help make the decision. No easier choice to just follow someone’s lead. Decisions don’t come any harder than the ones he had to make in his life. This was only foreshadowing what was to come. Did he quickly calculate his odds and swim for shore as soon as he saw the boat was foundering, or did he try to hold her together till there was no hope left, braving seas that were by that time dramatically worse to try and save the boat he built singlehandedly? Did he risk going down with the ship by groping frantically through rising waters in the below-deck cabin for one treasured belonging he couldn’t bear to leave behind? If he did, what was so valuable that he risked his life over retrieving it? And when he reached shore did he walk away unscathed, or were his nights haunted with nightmares of drowning? A sea of churning water stood between him and life on that…that what? I don’t even know if it was night or day. Either way, he lived to not tell about it.

As a child I one time skipped down barefoot onto a gnarl of fish hook cactus and it lodged deep in the sole of my foot. My father came toward me to take it out and I warned him away with screams and tears. He laughed and asked if I intended to leave it there forever. I really did have to think about it for a minute. If it had been me in that sinking boat, the smallest doubt of whether I could swim over raging seas and make it to land alive would have me clutching to the last bit of floating debris of that boat like it was God Himself, and only He could save me from being swallowed by the sea. My fate would rest on how buoyant my bit of detritus was. I would use all my strength trying to make that shard of timber float, trying to rescue my rescuer so the rescuer could save me.

No such complications for my father. All my life he whistled while he shaved, sang while he worked, and went about his business with good cheer. Each day was a new opportunity to enjoy life, and whatever stories his past held, that’s where they stayed. When I grew up and became interested in him as a person as well as a father, one day I asked how he had the sheer guts and strength to get up and go back to work shortly after breaking his back and being paralyzed (for life) at 26. All he said was, “I had to, I had a family to feed.” Those words are plenty to tell me who he was, but I wanted all the elements of plot. I wanted the how and the why. And yet I didn’t have the guts to ask.

I wasn’t born yet when he fell off the roof of their new home and into a wheelbarrow, but I hurt to even think of all the crashing of bones and nerves and hearts and hopes and dreams that started when his body came freefalling onto the edge of that wheelbarrow spine-first. I don’t want to know about the pain, how scared he must have been, how dashed his dreams, how fearful for his future, no less his pregnant wife’s and two sons’. Even thinking about those pains is too painful for me.

In the hospital after his injury doctors tickled his feet. They poked his calves and pressed their fingers into his thighs. Nothing. No feeling. The doctors wouldn’t operate. They said it was no use. My grandmother stormed the hospital and they relented, slicing a 14-inch gash down his back. They poked around a bit, sewed him back up, and said, “Yep. He’ll never walk again.” He didn’t talk for a month. Then he dragged himself out of the hospital, stuffed his bodycasted self in the Jeep with my mother and brothers, and said goodbye to their new home in Denver. They couldn’t think clearly there. They needed to re-gather their lives within the familiarity of the house they still owned in California, among loving family and concerned friends. For the next six months he taught himself to walk with a complex series of movements that began with swinging his hips and legs forward with the strength of his glutes. When his uncle, Pappy we called him, told him it was time to saw off his body cast and see what he had, that’s what he did. After fits and starts he began walking with two canes, then one, then finally none. Still with no feeling below his hips. But it was something.

After the injury he developed other strengths. His arms could hold all us children at once. His calm could make any problem, however seemingly tragic at first, suddenly approachable. His courage could hold the weight of all our worlds on his shoulders. But part of that courage came by refusing to consider himself in any way but like everybody else. He simply refused to treat himself as paralyzed, and damned if anyone else would dare. So if I asked even the most innocuous question about his injury, would opening up and talking about it, satisfying his cherished daughter’s curiosity, open a hole that let all that long-ago pain come rushing back? I wouldn’t risk it.

That’s what I know. And I wouldn’t ask him for more. It wasn’t really lack of courage that stopped me from asking. I know that now. It was respect. Every day my father lived his life as a man with full use of his body would. He never gave in to physical limitations, never mind self-pity. He would not use handicap parking spaces. He coached and umpired Pony League baseball. He climbed on roofs and pounded them with sheets of shingles whenever that needed to be done, and I doubt he ever considered that irony.

He was a man of few words and was a firm believer that the value of a person’s life is in his deeds. That didn’t make him hard. Quite the opposite. He knew what a man is capable of. But he also knew how a man can suffer. Just seeing my father and what he did every day was enough to tell me the worth of the man. I didn’t need to know how he made it to shore to know he was strong. I didn’t need to know what he did in the war to know he was brave.

All this happened. And it affected our lives in unimaginable ways. In aggregate theconsequences of that accident hurled our little family off orbit. He spent months at a time in the hospital because of internal injuries and infections and other complications. My mother tried to hold it all together, keeping house and feeding and caring for her three beloved children plus being a more intimate nurse to her husband than she could have ever dreamed of. But her struggles are a different story. The family is still trying to regain its balance now, a decade after he’s gone and well into his grandchildren’s adulthood. We’ll make it. In another generation the pain won’t even be a memory. But the family will be strong. Partly because he refused to let us be weak.

When he was late into his 70’s, on kidney dialysis for some kind of a record dozen years, his speech a little slurred from mini-strokes and body wasted by decades of thecomplications of paralysis, it finally occurred to me that he was not immortal. I asked him to write his life story. I wanted to know whatever stories he wished to share with me. He said he would, and so he spent his days at dialysis filling notebooks. His hands weakened and his handwriting deteriorated. We got him a dictation recorder, but he didn’t want to bother his fellow dialysees. So he went on with the notebooks, filling them with barely legible sentences and paragraphs and pages, pouring out his life with clearly apparent joy at what he had lived. He started with his grandparents, describing their lives, and four yellow-lined legal notebooks later he ended with his own early adulthood. That’s as far as he got before passing away on August 31, 1997, at 1:55 in the morning.

He never got to the part about the sailboat. But that’s alright. I know everything that’s important about my father.

No sailor approaching Pemaquid Point, Maine, can look upon that black coast with anything but dread. Monolithic rock walls jut from the ocean floor like fists, waves crashing and wind howling the names of all those lost at this ocean graveyard. Here the sea churns with tide and wind, fast ocean currents snag on rock outcrops and swirl the water into fearful chaos.

For eons nature’s forces have battered the shore, but those rocks are some of the hardest on earth, and if they can withstand thousands of years of such violence, they can withstand the hull of any boat or bone of sailor’s skull.

It was toward this point that the ship Angel Gabriel sailed on the night of August 14, 1635. She was a 240-ton barque and armed with 16 cannon, uncommon for a ship called to passenger duty, but this was no common ship.

She was originally commissioned into service and outfitted for combat by Sir Walter Raleigh for his voyages to South America. The mighty barque had seen battle at Cadiz, and at great odds fought three Spanish galleons simultaneously that repeatedly stormed the English ship and were beaten back each time, the Angel Gabriel losing three men to the Spanish ships’ five hundred.

For that deed a ballad was written, to be oft repeated by English seaman in search of courage on windy, moonless nights.

Now the galleon was in more peaceful service, transporting passengers from her home port at Bristol, England, to the New World, this time to land at Pemaquid, Maine.

Upon the Angel Gabriel was John Bailey, my eighth great grandfather, whose blood courses through seven generations before entering my Eggleston line. John and his eldest son had secured the required approvals from their parish priest, invoked the oath of allegiance, and once on board, obtained their licenses and the proper seal from England’s official emigration agents. Now they had only to endure the 12 weeks of rough seas it would take to sail from Bristol to Pemaquid.

On the last day of May in the year 1635, five ships left Bristol together. After dropping their river pilots at the mouth of the Severn on June 9, three ships sailed off on their own, confident they could outrun any pirate ship that pursued, for pirates prowled those waters in search of whatever treasure they could capture. The James chose to stay near the heavily armed but slow Angel Gabriel for protection.

The passing was not easy. With winds strong and waves high, the ship swayed violently. Not just for hours, but for weeks. Many if not most passengers were seasick, dizzy, light headed, vomiting, barely able to stand or walk without falling. A passenger, the Reverend Richard Mather, grandfather of the minister and scholar Cotton Mather, wrote in his diary that none could go on deck because of “the tossing and tumbling of the ship.”

Yet I’m sure some, maybe John Bailey walked the decks, drinking in the invigorating sea air, entertaining themselves watching the occasional pod of curious dolphins that sailed alongside the ship for long distances, and enjoying the fresh seafood the crew sometimes hauled on board.

More weeks went by. The going was slow, so slow that the James sometimes furled only three sails just to stay beside the Angel Gabriel.

Twenty days out to sea the Angel Gabriel and the James pursued a Turkish pirate ship that had taken one of the ships that left Bristol with them, the Mary. They could not catch it and so regretfully turned back to their course.

On July 4, the James decided not to wait for the slower galleon any longer. Mather wrote that, “we lost sight of the Angel sayling slowly behind us, and we never saw her again any more.”

After twelve weeks at sea the Angel Gabriel sighted land. Under cloudy skies, she sailed into a small cove on the coast of Maine and dropped anchor. There was a small settlement at the place, called Pemaquid. John Bailey and the other ship’s passengers were ferried to shore on small boats, and there gave thanks for the voyage and now having solid earth under their feet.

They immediately began the arduous task of unloading their belongings, but were taken by surprise by a violent storm.

They worked as long as they could, filling the dinghies with trunks, barrels, and livestock, rowing them to shore through the tumbling surf, dragging what they could across the rock and sand and away from the rising seas.

They had to watch in horror, helplessly, as the surf grew too dangerous to risk further trips to the Angel Gabriel. As night fell and the storm grew in power, most took refuge in the homes of the townspeople, though some of the crew stayed aboard the Angel Gabriel.

Thus commenced the most ungodly hurricane ever to hit New England, then or now, as evidenced in recent analysis by The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA.

A storm surge of twenty two feet, the highest in history, sent wave after wave crashing into shore, wiping out all before it. Unknown numbers of Native Americans lost their lives. On its route from Ipswich to Marblehead the coastal barque, Watch and Wait, owned by another of my ancestors, Isaac Allerton, foundered off of Cape Ann with twenty three aboard. All but two were lost.

Homes in the town of Plymouth were blown down like matchsticks, and mile-wide swaths of forest were leveled by winds well over 130 miles per hour. Farther down-coast the James sought safe harbor from the storm at the Isles of Shoals, but the cables could not hold their anchors and all snapped, the wind and surf now pushing the ship ever closer to the rocks. But they were saved when the hurricane winds reversed to the northeast and pushed the ship away from the islands. The James sailed into Boston the next day, its sails in tatters.

In outer Pemaquid Harbor the Angel Gabriel began to slip her anchors, her cables strung taught as more than 300 tons fought to rip away from their hold. But the cables could not hold, and gave way in snaps like mighty whips, lashing through sails already shredded by the winds.

The ship then drifted at the mercy of wind and waves, bowing and rising like a colossal monster from the sea, keel pointed skyward, only to slam back into the troughs, waves crashing over her decks, bowsprit dipping as though straight to the bottom of the sea. Thus she was reduced to splinters, her crew lost.

When they left England each of the Angel Gabriel’s passengers had to sacrifice what they could not transport on the ship, leaving behind treasured bureaus, beds, pianos, wardrobes; the poorer ones choosing only a few articles of clothing, maybe a few utensils and cooking vessels. Now once more their earthly belongings were being culled. This time the sea would take everything they had left in the world, and there was nothing they could do about it.

When John Bailey awoke the next morning and left his shelter, he beheld such destruction as he had never seen. What was this new land he had come to that could wreak such hell?